


Fake Empire

by sidnihoudini



Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-15
Updated: 2010-03-15
Packaged: 2017-11-26 03:23:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/646028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidnihoudini/pseuds/sidnihoudini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His name is Chris.  </p><p>He’s thirty four years old, is a dog owner, and sleeps in a king sized bed with another man on the regular.  His kitchen is outfitted with stainless steel appliances, professional grade knives and expensive track lighting, and the storage underneath his sixty inch plasma television in the living room is full of paperbacks and history novels.  He subscribes to paper copies of <i>The New York Times</i>, and sets his DVR to tape <i>Saved By The Bell</i> reruns every morning.</p><p>Chris, thirty four years old and clearly a knowledge junkie, stands in his kitchen, alternating between watching the dog watching him carefully from his bed in the corner, and flipping through a wallet that he finds on the kitchen counter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fake Empire

**Author's Note:**

> Written for pintofest over at LiveJournal, my prompt was _Chris and Zach get amnesia, and can't remember one another_. Somehow it turned into 16,000+ words, I guess memory loss gets me carried away or something?...

_“Hi, I’m Clementine, can I have a piece of chicken?_ Then you just took it. It was so intimate. It was like we were already lovers.”

          -- Joel, _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_

 

.

 

Chris wakes up on a Monday morning with a clear head, both of his feet freezing cold, and absolutely no idea who the man still asleep next to him is.

In retrospect, laying bleary-eyed and calm in the twilight of such a dim spring morning was a terribly composed way to begin the day. But, alternatively, at such an hour of the day, Chris had really only been trying to keep the warm wash of an impending panic attack at bay.

He blinks rapidly, and compulsively tries to remember the color of his own eyes.

.

His name is Chris. 

He’s thirty four years old, is a dog owner, and sleeps in a king sized bed with another man on the regular. His kitchen is outfitted with stainless steel appliances, professional grade knives and expensive track lighting, and the storage underneath his sixty inch plasma television in the living room is full of paperbacks and history novels. He subscribes to paper copies of _The New York Times_ , and sets his DVR to tape _Saved By The Bell_ reruns every morning.

Chris, thirty four years old and clearly a knowledge junkie, stands in his kitchen, alternating between watching the dog watching him carefully from his bed in the corner, and flipping through a wallet that he finds on the kitchen counter.

A Bank of America debit card for a Z. John Quinto, and, behind that, a Californian drivers license registered under Zachary J. Quinto. Chris eyes the newspaper rolled up on the counter again, with its mailing address listing _Christopher Pine_ as the subscriber, and then the 35mm photo on the license.

He is clearly still Chris, then.

Thumbing the identification back into the wallet, Chris digs around again, but ultimately comes up short of anything else other than a few twenties, two credit cards, and a wholesale membership card for Costco.

Chris is about to start rummaging through the manila file folder packed full of bills and receipts on the island granite top when there’s a shuffle in the hallway, the dog fully perks up, and Zachary Quinto himself comes wandering into the kitchen, rumpled looking and terrified, albeit quietly.

“Good morning,” Chris greets, and offers up the wallet. He wonders if Zachary realized Chris had been in bed with him, that they had slept together, and were clearly either making a huge mistake, seriously dating, or already somewhere in the confines of marriage.

Zachary offers him a bewildered frown, but accepts the wallet regardless.

“Sorry, I…” He begins, but trails off quickly, mystified as he twists the leather wallet around in his hands, and then, realizing, belatedly tries to cover his bare chest with one awkward, bent at the elbow forearm. 

Licking his lips, Chris tugs the bill and receipt envelope out from its spot wedged between what looks like a bible full of takeout menus, and an unopened package from Netflix. He realizes that the rental is addressed to C/Z QUINTO as he’s opening his mouth to reply to Zachary’s tense words.

“I don’t know, okay,” He begins honestly, as his stomach does a little seasick flip. Zachary eyes him wearily, and unfolds his wallet, one eye still trained on Chris. “But, I do know that my name is Chris. I woke up about an hour ago, we live on Hyperion Street, and… that’s our dog.”

When they both turn their attention to the pet, he begins to thump his tail against the floor, chin laid low on the bow of both paws.

“I’m going to have a heart attack,” Zachary tells himself, and has to stop and sit down on one of the bar stools, folding his arms up and over his head on the slab of granite that doubles as the kitchen island top.

Chris licks his lips again nervously, compulsively, and almost papercuts himself on last month’s water bill.

“I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation,” Chris says, feigning casual maturity as he watches Zachary, and then leans against the counter top himself, heart thundering wildly inside his chest.

.

“Here you go,” Chris says, quietly, sliding a plate of dry toast across the counter with one hand, and a bar glass full of Jack and Coke with the other.

Zachary reaches out for the drink first, hands shaky from adrenaline or shock or both.

“Thank you,” He replies, just as quiet, as he clinks the ice cubes around in the glass.

Taking a swig right from the liquor bottle, Chris reaches for his own piece of toast, whole wheat with packaging from Whole Foods – it says $4.29 a loaf, they must be big spenders or just really terrible with their money – and opens his mouth wide, managing to bend the toast in half without breaking it.

He fits the entire piece in his mouth, a skill he’s worked on since childhood.

“We should call an ambulance, or our parents, or, or…” Zachary trails off, clearly not paying any attention to Chris’ terrible manners, as he shakes his head, eyes finally ticking up towards Chris to gauge his reaction.

Chris struggles in chewing the toast enough to swallow.

“Maybe we should wait,” He finally manages, tonguing a stray grain out from between his back molars. Zachary raises his eyebrows questionably. “Just for a little while, you know? Long enough to see if… I don’t know, maybe there is a reason, and we just haven’t found it yet.”

Taking another swig of his drink, Zachary makes a face after he swallows – Chris admits he did make it a little strong – and wipes his mouth over with the back of his hand.

“What if we were in an accident or something?” Zachary asks, and Chris has to admit, he raises a good point. “I’m pretty sure _memory loss_ is a significant injury.”

Chris nods, and begins pulling the second piece of toast apart, leaving half for Zachary.

“I know, and I agree, just…” He trails off, and snorts, looking Zachary in the eye. “I just want to know a little bit more about myself before we bring anybody else into it.”

For a second Chris is pretty sure Zachary is going to argue the point some more, but then he just nods, this slow movement of his head that ends with it tipped back so he can finish off the last two mouthfuls of his drink.

”Noon,” Zachary grits from the liquor burn, setting his empty glass back against the counter top, crystal hitting granite with a sharp snap. “And then we both drive to the emergency room.”

Chris nods, and then there’s a small smile tugging at his face, and he can’t help but add, voice self deprecating, “If either of us can remember where it is.”

.

They split up.

Zachary takes the office, which looks as though they share it, with its desktop computer set up in one corner, and laptop balanced precariously on top of a high stack of books, scripts and notepads in the other.

They very quickly figure out that they’re pop culture relevant when Chris unearths a _Scene It: Science Fiction in the ‘00s_ board game in the living room drawers, and there’s a blue-grey photo of Zachary with pointed ears and a Starfleet uniform faded in above the title.

Chris digs through the rest of the living room with detached interest – at most, he realizes that he is in the photos and the answering machine message, and it’s his opinion that had a place in purchasing the couch and the rug and the coffee table – but the fact that he doesn’t remember a moment of it leaves him thinking, _why did I buy an armchair that perfectly matches the couch?_ and then, more importantly, _why aren’t the DVDs organized by genre_ and then _title_?

“I found some things,” Zachary says vaguely, as he wanders back into the living room with the dog at his heels, forty five minutes after Chris began rummaging through drawers and the dining room cutlery.

Interested, Chris looks up from where he’s currently sorting through a shoebox of assorted loose photographs and paper mementos on the dining room table.

“All I have is a note I wrote you six years ago that doesn’t make any sense, and the dog’s vaccination record. His name is Noah, by the way,” Chris says, glancing down at Noah sitting between them. Upon hearing his name for the first time that day, his ears perk up, and he trots over to Chris, sitting at his foot.

Zach raises his eyebrows in interest, a lot like Noah’s ears, and comes over to the table with his arm full of assorted memorabilia.

“Take this before I drop it,” He murmurs, handing Chris a shoebox awkwardly, and then very quickly following that up with the laptop. The shoebox is held together with a couple of grocery elastics, and the laptop has a sticker on the top that reads BEFORE THE DOOR in huge, obnoxious letters.

Setting the objects down on the table, Chris watches as Zachary sets another manila folder down flat on top of the computer, and then a paperback book.

“What’s the significance of that?” Chris asks, eyeing the spine of the book. Cormac McCarthy’s _The Road._

Zachary raises his eyebrows, glancing between Chris and the book. “Nothing, it just looked interesting. And I can’t remember ever reading it, so…”

A slow smile twists Chris’ mouth up into a grin so perfectly that he’s afraid he’s about to do something really ridiculous, like ruffle Zachary’s hair fondly before they’ve even had a chance to draw boundaries and rules for the significant other that you don’t remember.

“So, first of all,” Zachary begins, as though they’re conducting business and already off to a great start for the meeting. Chris raises his eyebrows and leans forward, interested as Zach looks him dead in the eye. “We’re married by the state of California. I figured you should know.”

A hot flush warms Chris through all of his bones, and then he’s almost sure he’s blushing.

“For how long?” He asks, voice soft, as Noah gets tired of waiting around for him and sticks his head in Chris’ lap, damp little nose nudging at the curve of his hand.

Out of reflex, Chris opens his hand and palms Noah’s head, fingers scratching idly.

“Since,” Zachary looks down at the piece of paper he has in one hand, turning it right side up before he tilts his head to match the angle of the writing, and answers, “Four years ago. It says we registered in 2011.”

Chris sits back in the chair, staring openly at Zach without fully meaning to. “Wow.”

”Yeah. I found a box of videotapes and DVRs, too,” Zachary trails on, folding the marriage registration carefully back into fours, and tucking it right into the manila envelope. “One of them dates back to 2007, it’s labeled _1 Year Anniversary_.”

Shaking his head slowly, Chris drops his gaze as Noah loses interest in him and wanders away, detouring to retrieve his bright green plastic bone from the front hallway before heading for the loveseat in the living room.

“That’s a lot of history to forget,” Chris says, quietly, glancing back up at Zachary.

Zach returns the gaze, blinking slowly, and lets his mouth curl up a little, just at one of the edges. Like cell memory is telling him: this is what you do when Chris’ voice sounds just like that.

“Maybe it’s temporary,” He says, but then his voice cracks halfway through, so Chris really doesn’t believe that _he_ believes it. They both pause, regarding each other once more, before Zachary clears his throat and goes back to his folder full of documentation, head hung low.

Frowning, Chris watches the crown of Zachary’s head for a while, thinking, before he replies, sadly, “Or maybe we’ll wake up soon, and it’ll just be a really shitty dream.”

”Fingers crossed,” Zach manages, offering him up another smile, but this one seems even worse than the last.

.

They start with the older tapes.

There are three old school, plastic VHS tapes and then a handful of mini DVRs. Zach puts up a good argument as to why they should go in chronological order and start with the oldest ones first, so they do, after a crash course in how to work the overly complicated media system they’ve apparently got going on.

“I got it, I got it,” Chris announces, holding one hand out to calm Zachary’s litany of ‘if we JUST try THIS’ as he angles the remote down at the pile of assorted players stacked underneath the TV, and hits a combination of them at random.

As if by magic, the VHS tape makes a quiet click and then it’s _playing_ , this gloriously terrible cast of snow snapping onto the screen, before the tape garbles and the auto-tracking flips on, straightening the picture out after a moment of struggle.

The angle is unfortunate, to say the least, and largely compromised of Zachary’s jawline.

“Say hi,” On-screen Chris demands, zooming in rapid speed at Zach’s cheek.

In the living room, Zachary covers his eyes with one hand, and mumbles, “Oh my god.”

”Tell me who you are,” The Chris on the TV is continuing, and that’s when Chris actually finds himself blushing for real, hot cheeked from the blatant flirtiness in his tone on screen. They’re _bantering_ , even though Zach is having _none of it_.

Despite the death glare Zach casts into the lense, he replies, “You know who I am.”

”Maybe I don’t,” Chris replies instantaneously, and then just like that the audio blips and begins to warble, and then they’re both left sitting on the couch in heavy silence as the auto-tracking pops up again, and the tape resiliently tries to right itself.

On screen, the camera coasts between Zach’s face and an unyielding, never-ending stretch of road that looks baked in the summer sun, and about ten million years away from where they are right now.

“Well, what _would_ you do if you forgot me?” Chris is now arguing onscreen, and, on the couch, real life Chris with his real life stomach feels it drop right down into the rounds of his toes, where it curls up into a little sick ball and makes him feel queasy straight through to his finger tips.

Reaching for the remote, Chris says, “Maybe we shouldn’t…”

“It’s just coincidence,” Zachary tells him, carefully, but even so, he doesn’t sound at all convinced himself.

Chris eyes him, warily, but lets the tape play on.

.

Zachary breaks his own rule about leaving for Emergency at noon.

They spend the afternoon watching the tapes on their couch, letting each and every one play through as-is, no matter how intimate and embarrassing the content.

At one point in the DVRs, Zach confiscates the camera, and quietly explains to the home audience that Chris is going through a phase where he tapes anything, and, watching it back now, he isn’t wrong. 

There is footage of Zach waking up in the morning, followed by Chris fumbling around with the camera one-handed at breakfast, and then Noah running around in the backyard, barking and doubling back to try and interest Chris. All of a sudden the audio peaks and it cuts from the front hallway, and then they’re in New York, in a black city car driving through town.

Chris watches New York City fly past them on the screen, and feels the nausea bubble up even higher in his stomach.

“Alright. This is really weirding me out,” He confesses at one point, one hand covering the side of his face as he turns and watches Zachary crookedly, sitting at one end of the couch with two pillows stacked in his lap.

His legs are twisted up into a knot that echoes the same position Zach was sitting in the tapes, when they’d been at his goddaughter’s birthday party, and he was there on the floor with a rainbow of balloons behind him and a half eaten plate of cake balanced on one knee. 

For Chris, it’s like looking through a loophole, and right through into an alternate reality.

“It’s a lot to take in,” Zachary agrees, returning Chris’ not so inconspicuous eyeballing from his side of the sofa. After a moment of staring across at one another, Zachary’s eyes trail across the room, to the windows, where the sun is beginning to set above the line of houses opposite theirs.

Chris licks his lips, and quietly turns his attention back to the screen.

.

Birthdays, anniversaries, kisses, more hugging than Chris thought was possible. There are these intimate moments that Chris wishes with such ferocity that he could remember, and one interesting occasion where Zach gave him a taste of his own medicine, and snuck in with the camera when Chris was poking at his eyebrows in the bathroom mirror and talking to himself.

He didn’t realize a grown man could scream like such a woman, but there you have it.

The last DVR is dated back to two years ago, and a lot of it is of a vacation they apparently took up the west coast, through Oregon and then up into Canada. There are short clips of Zach smoking over the metal railings that hug touristy mountain rest stops, and then a click and a flash of Chris holding an unfortunate looking mermaid statuette in a gift stop somewhere further North, two fingers pinching her ceramic nipple.

The last moment was shot into the glass of a tinted car window, and it’s only a reflection, you can just barely make out their faces, but it’s the casual body language that really translates. Really knocks Chris in the gut, making him physically have to take his gaze away and look at the carpet instead.

“What if we can’t fix it?” Chris blurts, as the footage ends and then all that they’re left with is a black screen staring back out at them in the dimmed living room. “Because this is really starting to freak me out.”

Zachary looks at him carefully, sadly, almost, like maybe he was thinking the same thing.

“We’ll figure it out, Chris,” He says, after a moment’s hesitation. Chris doesn’t know much about this Zach, but he does know that he doesn’t believe him right now. “First thing tomorrow morning, we’ll go to the hospital.”

Licking his lips, Chris nods, and leans forward, carefully sliding the television remote back down onto the table.

.

It’s late, but it isn’t late enough to end the day they’ve had, so Zachary takes the dog for a walk while Chris piles all of the videotapes back into their rightful box, and then wanders around the house, peeking in drawers, and looking behind every door he finds. 

He feels like a creep, a total voyeur, poking around somebody else’s house

The office Zachary was in earlier is at the end of the hallway, and it’s filled with boxes and boxes of memorabilia, framed photographs hung on the wall and rested at the edges of each desk, all of them with Zach or Chris tucked inside, standing or laughing or speaking with somebody new.

Chris very quickly takes to flipping each frame over, as he realizes one of them has a penchant for scrawling the photograph’s subjects on the back card.

_Zach and Leonard, ’10; Chris and Zach, NYC ’07; Chris and Gwynne Dec 26’06; Chris & Zach Pittsburgh/Nationals Concert ’12; Noah and Kristen and Zach on set in 2009; Trek Promo Convoy (Convoy!) ’09 Auckland NZ._

Frowning, Chris flips each frame over and over in his hands before setting them back down into their rightful spots, lined throughout each shelf, a few on the window sill, scattered on various points of Zachary’s desk.

Chris leans over and rifles one-handed through a few of the topmost piles of documents stacked in a few particular spots on the desktop. A water bill dated three days ago, a note that Chris had written at some point in a quick scrawl regarding a friend’s dinner party in a few nights, a check-up postcard from the vet to Noah.

All mementos from a life neither of them can remember, and have forgotten absolutely every detail about. Chris pockets the dinner party note and the vet reminder, too; at least those are two things that he knows they can manage.

Remembering their supposed wedding, however, is going to need a little more effort.

.

Twenty minutes later, Zachary returns to Chris sitting at the dining room table, laptop braced in front of him as he searches for abrupt memory loss on Google.

“That was…” Zachary starts, but then pauses in the middle of the living room, with the dog’s leash looped around one hand as Noah runs off to find water. “Really, really bizarre.”

Chris looks up curiously: Google is answering absolutely none of his questions.

“What? What happened?” He asks, forehead wrinkling as he closes the laptop lid, pushing is incongruously across the polished table top.

Scrubbing one hand over his face, Zachary stops to think for a moment, and then answers, voice laden with confusion, “Some guy came out of a restaurant, and started taking my photo. Like, forty or fifty shots of me, just walking down the street…” He gestures one arm aimlessly, as Chris’ eyebrows lift up into his hairline and he leans closer without really meaning to, listening intently. “He was calling me by name, like he knew me, and asked all of these questions about you, and then something called _Adam’s Rib.”_

“Adam’s Rib?” Chris repeats, screwing up his face. Zachary shrugs both shoulders and comes over to the table, tossing the leash through the kitchen doorway before he drops himself down onto the chair, posture sagging.

He leans back against the chair, and says, “It was just… strange. Really strange. He followed me until I got to the end of the street.”

”Really?” At this point Chris feels a bit bad for his unbridled curiosity into a circumstance which obviously as Zachary reeling a bit, well, more than a bit, sitting there with a confused expression on his face and warmth high in his cheeks. Chris reaches for the laptop again, flipping it open one-handed as Zachary sits beside him, watching.

He sounds a little curious, too, now, as he asks, voice piquing, “What are you doing?”

”I just want to see what this Adam’s Rib thing is,” Chris explains, typing it into the Google search query page that was still on ‘abrupt memory loss.’ 

Immediately a long string of listings come up of over 1,250,000 search results. Chris leans closer, squinting to read the text properly.

Zachary sits quietly for a second, before leaning forward at the hip, and saying, “Chris, you’re killing me here…”

“Sorry,” Chris apologizes, sitting back a few inches before he clicks on the track pad and then spins the laptop around to face Zach.

As Zachary mutters, “I don’t have my glasses,” Chris drops down out of his chair and shuffles around the corner of the table on his knees, so he can kneel beside Zach and still flip through the search results with him. 

Scrolling, he sees that there are a bunch of image results of Zach by himself, and then some older ones, from the 40s, of Audrey Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

“That’s okay, I’ll read it, listen,” Chris says, tugging the laptop a little closer to them both as he clicks on a link to IMDB and reads aloud, “ _Zachary Quinto has been announced in another classic Hollywood remake…”_ He trails off and scans quickly over a couple of lines that don’t seem too important, and then picks it back up, saying, _“Aha – he will be revitalizing the role of Spencer Tracy… now lets hope that they can sign Chris Pine to star opposite, as Hepburn.”_

Zachary is quiet for a second before he says, voice low, “Funny.”

“You don’t think I could do it?” Chris teases, before he really even realizes that it’s out of his mouth. Zach glances down at him kneeling on the floor, with this warm, amused expression on his face, before shaking his head, and leaning back in the dining chair with a weary exhale. 

Resting both palms over his knees, Zach says, “At least it explains the photographer.”

”I guess.” On a whim, Chris leans forward and types, ‘Zachary Quinto Christopher Pine paparazzi photo.’

The Google result pops back, asking him if he meant ‘Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine paparazzi photo,’ with a few page results below that from blogs dated 2009 and 2010. He clicks on the recommendation, and promptly feels his belly drop down against the floor when the corresponding results pop up.

“Oh my god,” Zachary intones, face right over Chris’ shoulder as they both lean in closer, horrified.

Chris scrolls down the page halfway, eyes scanning over all of the headlines it brings up as results: Chris and Zach go for Groceries, Chris and Zach Leaving Party in Hollywood Hills, Chris and Zach walking, Chris and Zach clothes shopping, Chris and Zach on a day off in Venice Beach.

“And this is all of us?” Zachary bumbles, reaching forward to take over navigational duty as he scrolls down a fraction, and clicks on one link that apparently features them shopping in the bulk section of Whole Foods together.

Kneeling there in silence, Chris makes a noise that could either be ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I guess so’ as he sits back and watches in morbid fascination as Zachary clicks through a thirty some-odd photo slideshow, which starts with them getting out of the car in the parking lot, disappearing through the sliding glass doors, wandering the aisles of the grocery store, and finally rolling the loaded grocery cart back across the parking lot. 

Zach is pushing it, leaving Chris to hold a half empty bottle of water, and stare dead into the photographer’s lense. 

Chris’ eyes scan over the little blog blurb beside it, where there’s a not so clever attempt at pegging Chris as the ‘woman’ as he isn’t ‘doing any of the work.’ Without meaning to, Chris can feel himself getting riled up right away, that tense wind in his chest already beginning to peg at his insides.

“Maybe it’s not so bad that we don’t remember it,” Chris tries to joke, but it comes out sounding strained, like it’s too-true, a little bitter, and a lot melancholy.

Zachary gives him a look from the corner of his eye, and abruptly closes the browser.

.

It’s strange, being a voyeur to your own life. 

Despite Chris’ alright judgment, he sits at the dining room table for the better part of an hour, and makes the rounds on what he quickly finds out are all of the popular gossip sites. 

He flips through all of the paparazzi photo sets, reads poorly written posts about them breaking up, the supposed grand reunifications that follow, and arguments that ‘anonymous contributors’ say they have overheard at Vanity Fair dinner parties.

When Zach comes in with two plates of cannelloni an hour later, Chris feels dreary and whitewashed, looking up from the laptop screen with dry eyes.

“Everybody is referring to us as one of Hollywood’s Golden Couples,” Chris tells him, cheek propped up against his fist as he rolls his eyes up to watch Zachary’s reaction as he leans across and over the table, setting both places down.

Zachary rights himself before he answers, sucking at a spot of sauce that migrated onto his thumb.

“I found a recipe under a magnet on the side of the fridge,” He replies, as he carefully takes in Chris’ drawn face, his weary expression.

Licking his lips, Chris sitting there with his eyes still trained on Zach’s face, he nods, _getting the point_ for once in his life for all he knows, and pushes himself upright, letting the laptop shut with a quiet, mechanical _click._

“Thank you for making dinner,” Chris says softly, pulling the plate toward himself with one finger. “It looks like…” In reality, there’s a bunch of watery sauce in a puddle, with a few tough looking noodles floating in it. Chris raises his eyebrows, and looks back up at Zachary’s face, saying, reverent, “It looks delicious.”

.

After they eat, Chris digs a bottle of wine out from what he discovers is a separate wine cooler they’ve got hidden underneath a counter, and follows Zach and the dog through into the living room, where the two aforementioned are already sitting, with their respective rawhide bone, and a popped bag of what Chris suspects might be stale popcorn.

“Beaujolais,” He reads off of the label, butchering the french as he sets two wine glasses down on the table, and settles beside Zachary on the couch.

Zach throws a piece of popcorn into the air for Noah, pops a couple of dry pieces into his mouth, and then holds a hand out for the glass of wine Chris is already pouring.

“I really hope neither of us are on any medications,” Chris tells him, taking a whiff straight from the bottle as he hands the glass over to Zachary. “It was the first one I saw in there, and it looks expensive, so it better be delicious.”

Shrugging one shoulder, because really, what does one brain dead amnesiac know about good wine, Zachary tongues a popcorn kernel from between his back molars and then takes a sip, letting the wine sit in his mouth for a few seconds he swallows it, and then promptly goes back to picking at the stuck popcorn.

“It tastes expensive,” Is all he says, which makes Chris laugh and then pour himself a glass before he stashes the wine bottle on the side table, and settles back into the couch cushions, watching as Zach scrolls through the movie channels, looking for something okay to watch.

Chris watches Zachary from the corner of his gaze, trying to be inconspicuous about it all as he sips at his wine and pokes the dog with both feet. If he’s already forgotten everything else, well this, he wants to remember this.

Tonight is the calm before the storm, and he knows it. Once they wake up tomorrow and turn up at the hospital with a couple of empty heads, he doesn’t know what will happen, and there’s a good fat chance everything will change.

Chris is sure of that, if nothing else.

.

They end up watching one of the newer Clooney flicks, and then the last half of a documentary on how organic produce is made before the wine is finished, and both of them are loopy with the need to sleep and be calm.

“Do you want me to sleep on – ” Zachary starts, sounding unsure of himself as he hesitates in getting up off of the couch, one hand against the arm rest and the other hung in mid air, waiting.

Chris feels his heart thunk rhythmically in his chest. “No, no,” He cuts him off, voice stilted and tense. “You don’t, you know. You don’t have to do that.”

”You’re sure?” Zach raises his eyebrows, searching. “Because I don’t mind…”

How do you negotiate sleeping arrangements with your forgotten significant other, anyways, Chris thinks to himself, wondering how far the are-you-sure, yes-I’m-sure conversations will lead.

”I’m sure. Just… get the lights,” Chris yawns, stretching both arms up and over his head, brain swimming for a moment with the sudden rush of blood he gets from standing up.

Zachary nods and pulls himself out of the couch, before he begins poking around through out the living room, turning this off and switching that, tucking away the stray boxes that they had pulled out earlier, and shutting the blinds halfway so the sun doesn’t shine in too brightly in the morning.

In the dark hallway leading to their bedroom, Chris swallows compulsively, and tries not to listen too hard to the sounds of Zachary moving around in the other room.

.

“Goodnight,” Chris says, after Zach has let the dog out and they’ve both climbed into either side of the bed, cold air filtering down the gap in-between them.

Zachary fixes his pillow and tugs at the throat of his t-shirt, before he replies, trying not to watch Chris too closely, “Goodnight.” 

The silence that falls over them once the light has been turned out is as thick as it is heavy, this coastal drape that falls over them both and weighs their heads down into their pillows, bodies sunken against the mattress.

.

They make it to the hospital just before one the next afternoon. Chris keeps a weary eye out for photographers, but doesn’t notice a single one between the driveway and where they pull into the parking lot entrance at Emergency.

And, you know, it feels deceptively normal, to show up and park in the emergency spots only. To open the car door and walk through the entrance of the hospital, he could be anyone, with any problem in the world.

The admitting nurse doesn’t seem to regard either of them with any sincerity, which Chris doesn’t realize he’s noticed until he’s already thinking about it.

“And the reason you’re here?” She asks, looking pointedly at Chris as she shuffles the two pieces of identification he’d forked over to her.

Zachary is rummaging around in his own wallet for a photo ID and his insurance card, so Chris pauses, resting one hand against the edge of the counter as he tries to convey in his facial expression exactly how ridiculous this situation is, before he says anything at all.

“I woke up, well, we both woke up yesterday, and neither of us can remember anything,” Chris tells her, his voice low as he leans as close as possible, hoping that nobody else in the waiting room overhears. He doesn’t want to be taken out of a hospital lobby and put directly into the psych ward. “My name, my job – I couldn’t even remember where I was.”

She gives him the wonk-eye, before looking at Zachary. “And are you here with him?”

“It’s both of us,” He smiles apologetically, as he hands over his drivers license and insurance. “Yesterday morning, I woke up, and… nothing was there.”

He taps himself in the temple with one finger.

“Well,” She shakes her head and pulls out two admittance forms, pushing one towards Chris and the other to Zach. “Fill these out, and bring them back to me. One of our pit doctors will see you as soon as possible.”

The tone in her voice says: You are both nut jobs, you make my everyday job harder, and I hope you just wander off into oblivion so I don’t have to deal with you first.

“Thank you,” Chris nods, sliding his form from the counter top.

People not believing them hasn’t really been an issue up until _right now_.

.

They fill out the admitting forms in relative silence, the only audible sound coming from either of them the quiet scratching of their ballpoint pens against the clipboards they have holding the forms.

“Do I have any chronic medical conditions?” Zachary wonders out loud, half under his breath as he first peers at Chris from the corner of his eyes, and then surreptitiously tugs up each sleeve of his shirt, looking for a medic alert bracelet.

Frowning, Chris flips the page on his over, and replies, “I don’t know, what about my current prescriptions and allergies?”

”I don’t know,” Zach trails off, before they boggle at each other for a second. “Maybe we should just mark everything we don’t know with a question mark.”

By the end of the third page, the question mark accounts for 70% of Chris’ answers.

.

The doctor sees Chris first.

“Do you have any symptoms besides the memory loss?” He asks, glancing up from where he’s still busy scribbling the last thing Chris said into his clipboard.

Chris clasps his hands together between his knees, and shakes his head.

“No. No headaches, no dizziness. I slept like a baby last night, I’m eating well…” He trails off and watches the doctor’s profile as he holds his own expressionless exterior, breaking every few seconds to lean and jot another fragment onto his paper. “It’s all exactly as it should be. I just can’t remember anything.”

The doctor finally turns to properly face him, as he stands up from the chair, both of his knees rickety looking as he straightens himself up, and reaches over Chris’ shoulder for the blood pressure cuff.

“You don’t remember anything at all? No childhood memories even?” The doctor asks, as Chris pulls his sleeve up and offers his arm.

Chris frowns. “I remember some things. Not a lot, but… a good amount is still in there. The last ten years might as well have been shaken out of my head, though, I don’t remember any of them.”

”Do you know your birthday, your full name?” The doctor starts pumping the cuff full of air with one hand as he reaches for Chris’ file with the other. “You wrote in your admittance form that you couldn’t recall whether or not you had any significant medical allergies, or if you’d been seen by your family doctor recently.”

Rolling his tongue over both his lips, Chris raises his eyebrows earnestly. “I don’t remember what I had for breakfast three days ago. If I wanted to find out who my family doctor is, I’d have to _physically search my own home_.”

”Calm down,” The doctor tells him, voice going gentle. “Your numbers will be wrong.”

Chris presses his lips together and sits back without thinking, both eyes rolling up to watch the ceiling as he waits for the doctor to finish with his blood pressure, and record it on his otherwise useless chart.

“Are you physically sore anywhere? Any fresh looking bumps, bruises, or scars?” The doctor asks, sliding the cuff away, and giving an inquisitive look down at Chris’ legs, which are covered from hip to ankle anyways.

Shaking his head again, Chris watches the crown of the doctor’s head as he feels both his knees through his jeans, and then picks one leg up, fingers digging down the line of his calf muscle. Chris doesn’t know what the doctor is looking for, exactly, but he’s also pretty confident that he’s not going to find it there.

“Well. You’re a real mystery,” He finally says, taking a step backwards, until his heel hits the wheel of his chair and he lowers himself down into it without thinking. “Let me call one of my attendings, and we’ll get our neurologist in here to see you as well.”

Chris nods, following the medical jargon like an episode of a medical drama, and says, “Thank you.”

.

They sit side-by-side in the waiting room for another twenty five minutes.

For the most part, Chris amuses himself by watching a random child the mother has forgotten to watch as it crawls around on the floor, talking to herself and bumping into things. Every now and then he’ll play voyeur to the free apps Zach has taken to downloading onto his iPhone, head rested heavy against the curve of Zach’s shoulder, both hands tucked up and under either armpit.

“Augh, you almost had it,” Chris whispers at one point, when Zachary’s stack in Topple II tips over and falls through the air just as he’s nearing a high score of 60,000.

They both look up when the clip-clip of high heels clacking against the floor starts coming towards them, Zach’s finger slipping on the touch screen and accidentally playing the game loss in slow motion as Chris adjusts his posture and sits up, letting both hands fall back down into his lap.

“Zachary Quinto, Christopher Pine?” She greets, raising her eyebrow as she extends one hand between the two of them.

Chris nods, reaching forward first to shake her hand and say, “Chris.”

”Zach,” Zachary says, even though he hasn’t referred to himself by the shortened nickname up until now, as he sits up a little straighter and tucks his phone away. She regards them both with a slight nod of the head, this tight lipped friendly little swirl of a smile playing on her face.

She takes a step back as they both stand up, and says, “I’m Maureen, resident neurologist, and I take it you two are my men without a brain?”

”Nothing new there,” Chris tries to joke, fingers twitching at his sides as he takes a small step closer into Zachary by instinct.

Beside him, Zach offers an awkward laugh as Maureen’s smile gets a little deeper, this time one of her dimples coming out as she regards Chris with an amused expression, and a slightly raised eyebrow.

“Be that as it may, you two are still my men of the hour, anyways,” She smiles, voice as warm as any other doctor practices theirs to be as she gestures over her shoulder with a slight nod of the head, continuing, “If you two would follow me to my office? I’d like to ask you a few questions before we send you both down to Imaging.”

Chris nods, licking his lip out of habit as she smiles again over her shoulder and turns around on the point of her heel, hair bouncing behind her as she leads the way.

Taking a deep breath, Chris takes one step, and then another, and then another breath, and a corresponding step, glancing back over his shoulder once to make sure Zachary is still following behind him, every step of the way.

 

.

They spend a lot of time in Maureen’s office that afternoon.

It isn’t as Chris expected, how in the movies there’s a lot of yelling and pressure and talk about brain damage and extended hospital stays. She asks a few questions and then has one of her nurses show them down to Medical Imaging, where they each lay still long enough for a brain CT, and then eavesdrop on the technicians talking about various conquests in the control room.

Back upstairs, Maureen shows them articles, diagrams, a lifelike reproduction of the brain, where she points out where memories are held, and how they’re kept. She explains the various next steps that she’d be willing to take with them, and repeats herself in saying that she’s never seen two people simultaneously experience retrograde amnesia.

Neither of them have any swelling or liquid on the brain, in fact both of them are quite healthy – as Maureen looks over the digital images with them, she says there’s nothing she can be concerned about in terms of the actual makeup of their brains. For two active, healthy thirty-something year olds, their brains are completely normal.

“You have my direct line,” Maureen tells them both, still sitting at her desk as they tug their jackets on, and Zachary digs the car keys out of his pocket, eyebrows raised as he listens to her instruction. “Call me if anything changes. I’m going to call some specialist friends of mine, and I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.”

Chris would have to be blind and brainless to not notice the uncertainty in her face, her casually self-assured words as she smiles up at them and waits for each to thank her quietly, which they do, first Zach and then Chris.

“ _Now_ we need to find the wizard,” Zach sighs, as the office door swings closed behind them, and shuts itself with a loud clunk.

Thinking of red glitter, Chris manages a half smile before they both look in opposite directions from the other, beaten, and start down the corridor.

.

An hour spent back at home is all that it takes for the confusion and panic to bubble to a head, and, in the hallway between their bedroom and the living room, Zach comes up beside Chris quickly, quietly, and wraps a hand around his forearm, face calm and composed as he stops Chris from walking and backs him up against the wall, crowding in on his personal space, and breathing warm against his mouth.

“Just in case,” He murmurs, staring Chris dead in the eye for a split second before he leans in, hand still wrapped around the thickest part of Chris’ arm, and presses their mouths together for one warm, smothering second.

Chris pushes back, one hand coming up to rest at the crown of Zachary’s skull, fingers sinking into his hair, dragging heavy against his scalp as they kiss quietly, solemnly in the dead of the night, mouths wet and warm and so new against the other’s.

“Alright,” Zachary finally murmurs, once they’ve both backed off an inch, and their mouths are just hanging parallel each other’s, breath coming fast, fast, faster still, and cheeks hot with intent. Chris laughs under his breath, kind of, and then nods, flexing his fingers where they still rest against Zachary’s skull, tugging him closer. As Zachary leans in again, he says, so quiet that Chris can hardly hear it before their mouths are closing against the other again, “I just wanted to be sure…”

Nodding, his pulse triple-timed, Chris catches Zach’s eye, and knows.

.

Chris slips getting out of the shower that night, and catches himself with both hands against the sink counter. After a moment spent collecting himself, he finds himself still standing there, his heart thundering loudly in his chest.

“Jesus Christ,” He swears to himself, glancing up to catch his own reflection in the mirror.

Reaching up, over the sink, he slides the palm of his hand from one corner of the mirror across to the other, carelessly, like he’s done it a million times before, and then stares at himself for one hard moment, eyes flickering back and forth as he glances down to his belly button level with the counter top, and then back up, up to the top of his head.

 _Just remember_ , he thinks to himself decisively, heart still rattling off-beat. _How hard can it be to just_ remember?

.

Five minutes later, Chris is shuffling down the hallway with bare, damp feet, half heartedly scrubbing a towel through his hair. 

He leaves a trail of wet prints from the arch of his foot through the kitchen, and then it’s through into the living room, where he stops short, toes sinking into the thick carpet in the middle of the room.

Zachary is sitting on one of the couches, uncomfortably stiff as he re-watches one of their home movies, obviously by himself. Without meaning to, Chris notices that he has the TV remote poised on one knee: a quick, clean get-away.

“I didn’t hear you turn the water off,” Zach blurts, when he glances over, and realizes that Chris has caught him.

On-screen, Chris is talking way too close to the camera’s microphone as he alternates between narrating Zach cutting the backyard grass, and making fun of him as he does it, getting stuck when he tries to turn the mower around in a particularly tight spot.

In the living room, Chris’ hand stills on the crown of his head, and he feels his stomach twist, locking up and very quickly sending word up to his heart.

“Zach.” The expression looking back at Chris from the couch right now makes him want to babyshake the shit out of Zachary until it all comes flooding back. 

This brutish, angry flare in the pit of his stomach that is so sudden and urgent, telling him, hey, you know what? If the doctors don’t know, if you can’t do _anything else_ , sheer antagonism will break it down. Resentment will fix that broken hinge.

“I don’t know why I can’t just remember it,” Zach says, and just like that, in a second flat Chris finds himself sinking down into the cushion beside him instead, his damp towel hooked low around both shoulders as he lands on his left knee first, and opens both arms.

Chris’ head automatically bows forward as he leans his mouth against the curve of Zach’s shoulder, fingers tightening as Zach knots his own hand into the collar of Chris’ thin sleep t-shirt, tugging him closer, pulling him inexplicably deeper.

“I want to remember it all, too,” He whispers, closing his eyes as he digs deeper against the warm skin he finds in Zach’s neck, breath coming louder through his nose as he presses tighter, closer. A lump sinks low in his throat as he hears himself laugh on screen, voice as content as air, _You’d make a better pool boy than a gardener, Zach, maybe we should get you a straw hat and a pair of short-shorts – are you_ laughing?

It all sounds ten years away, or maybe even further than that, this simple, meaningless dig and following argument made by might as well be two strangers on-screen. It’s a dynamic that makes Chris laugh loudly, awkwardly, into the warm spot he’s staked out in Zach’s shoulder, before all of a sudden he’s sobbing of all things, these long, frustrated rounds of thick anger that coast up from his insides and paralyze him, until he’s wrapped around Zach as tightly as he can get him.

Something he might never know: right now, in this very moment, he is wound up as tightly as he was on the day that they met.

.

By his very nature, Chris had always been hot tempered.

In first grade a boy in the grade above him called him a name, so Chris had shoved him off of the top platform on the slide. In his graduating year of high school, he got into an argument with his Spanish professor that turned hot enough for her to threaten him with suspension until the end of term.

His mother hadn’t liked all of that a whole lot, even though his father had generally always referred to him as a “free spirit” before he’d inevitably get a stern talking to afterwards by Gwynne, for reinforcing Chris’ “destructive behavior.” 

Chris is still pretty sure he would have smacked the shit out of his sister’s twenty three year old cheating boyfriend regardless of whether his father had endorsed it not, but that’s neither here nor there.

He met Zach halfway through a backyard bar-be-que one of their mutual friends had thrown during the first week of summer, and, it had happened that the way they’d been introduced, is when Chris antagonized Zach’s then-boyfriend enough to get himself socked right in the eye.

“You shouldn’t have said that to him,” Zach had sighed after, handing over a bag of frozen green peas as they stood facing one another in the kitchen off of the balcony.

The immediate threat of the boyfriend had been non-existent, as he had quickly squealed off in his luxury European sports car after Chris himself snuck in a fist to the right cheekbone.

Chris had spit a mouthful of blood into the kitchen sink, accepted the bag with a grimace on his face, and said, “He deserved it.”

”Who _broke_ you, anyway?” Zach asked him, standing there with both arms crossed over his chest as he’d studied Chris’ face, the immediate flinch that flicked through his otherwise stoic expression as he pressed the freezer burnt bag to his swollen eye.

Smirking beneath the split lip and wobbly smile, Chris replied, “What are you, my therapist?”

”No, apparently I’m your mother,” Zachary had returned, voice light as he leaned over and pushed the bag a little harder against Chris’ brow bone.

Chris winced out of pressure, both eyes automatically closing from the pain that bloomed hot behind his eye socket, and, that had been it. When he’d opened his eyes again, Zach was gone, the kitchen empty, its screen door blowing back and forth in the wind, exactly as it had been before.

As it had ended up turning out, years later, nursing a couple of broken blood vessels had been one of the least significant things that had ended up coming out of that day. But, for that moment at least, Chris had rolled his tongue against his lip, made a face, and jumped up onto the countertop with one hand, balanced.

.

Chris closes the bedroom door as quietly as he can, not knowing if Zach has already managed to fall asleep or not, but. His question is answered as he turns around, surprised to see both windows swung wide open, with Zachary half leaned out onto the window sill over the driveway.

“Sorry,” He apologizes, when he sees Chris standing there. Chris isn’t sure what he’s talking about until he gestures to the cigarette he’s got in one hand with the other. “I found them in my jacket pocket. I don’t think I was hiding it, but…”

Flipping the light switch, Chris half smiles as he says, “Trust me, don’t worry about it.”

“Yeah,” Zach smiles back, watching Chris for a moment before he turns back to the window to smoke the rest of his cigarette, head bowed low out of view from Chris as he climbs into bed, arranging himself with both shoulders propped up against the headboard, his legs stretched out across the mattress in two different directions.

Chris pauses for a second, smoothing his palm down over the white comforter.

“She has no idea what it is,” He says, after a second, as Zachary tosses his smoked filter out onto the driveway and reaches up to pull the window down.

It slides back into place with a gentle click, and Chris watches as he reaches for the second one too, this time with his eyebrows raised, looking in Chris’ direction.

“Maureen,” Chris specifies, scratching the front of his hairline with his nails. “I looked at her face, and I just knew. She has no idea. None of them do – she said it herself, there’s nothing _wrong_ with us. It’s like… hysterical amnesia.”

Zachary sets his pack of cigarettes down on top of the alarm clock and climbs into bed, one long leg and then the other. He’s silent as he moves, and Chris watches him as he settles himself, flipping the blanket back up and over both legs as he leans back against the headboard.

“Well, it’s real to me,” He replies after a moment, running one hand through his hair. “I try to remember and I can’t. Nothing reminds me of you.”

Letting his own hand trail over the back of his head and then down his neck, Chris rolls his head against the headboard, turning until he’s looking at Zachary, his face still red from being over scrubbed at the sink, eyes tired looking and a paler brown.

“Everything reminds me of you,” Chris whispers, his head pressed uncomfortably hard into the wood of the headboard, his cheek stuck to the sticky wood varnish.

Zachary just looks at him for one steady, slow second, before his eyes flick left and then right over Chris’ face, and then he’s leaning in, holding Chris by the curve of the jaw as he kisses him the way that they’re meant to kiss, like Chris assumes they always have.

Head beginning to slide along the headboard from the pressure of Zachary’s mouth against his, Chris reaches up and holds Zach by the shoulder hem of his t-shirt so he can pull him up, pull him over, leaning back into the mattress and wiggling himself down against the sheets.

Without any hesitation, like they were both built to do just this, Zachary follows, one arm coming to wrap around Chris’ side, hand warm and as familiar as these things get these days as it settles low on his torso, pushing the bottom of Chris’ shirt up, getting the hem caught between the sheets and his back.

Breathing against Zach’s open mouth, Chris rolls his head to the side as Zachary starts mouthing down the line of his neck, pushing Chris’ shirt up with both hands until it’s bunched up underneath his arms, still stuck in that purgatory of bed sheets and skin.

Chris reaches down and knots his fingers into the hair above the nape of Zachary’s head, his eyes traveling down and over the spots where Zach is pressed back against him as he pushes at Zachary’s skull and then tugs at his hair, lifting his hips up off of the bed as Zach gets his fingers wiggled into the elastic of his flannel pants, and starts to pull them down, stopping to tongue below Chris’ belly button along the way.

“Ah,” Chris groans to himself, gritting his teeth as Zachary bites on the way down.

He wrinkles his nose and tips his head back, closing his eyes as he realizing he’s already starting to pant, that uncontrolled warmth that pools up from his belly and then down into his hips.

When his eyes open, they come to focus in on a photograph of the two of them, it’s sitting in a frame on the dresser running parallel with Chris’ side of the bed. In the photo they aren’t young, but they are young _er_ : they look happy to any end, and ready to face it.

Breath coming faster, then, Chris takes a gulp at the air and then Zach is sucking hot and wet right at the base of his cock. All of a sudden the photograph is gone, replaced with the ceiling as Chris rolls back and then up, grabbing Zachary by both shoulders to pull him back on top, landing mouth to mouth and dick to dick, Chris’ leg coming up to wrap around Zach at the waist.

Zachary pulls away, one thumb holding Chris’ face down by the chin as he studies his expression, both of them breathing hard, chests pressed together as Chris lets his mouth open as he waits, eyes locked with Zach’s gaze. And the air hangs heavy around them, still, for as long as it takes to get this memory back.

This cell memory where they wouldn’t ever have to look, or learn. Fifteen minutes later, as Zachary is sinking into him over and over, hips canted and arms braced against the mattress on either side of Chris’ body, he realizes that this is one more thing they instinctively have come to know.

.

The morning that comes after doesn’t break until well after eleven o’clock.

Chris wakes up with that still, sleepy bleariness pressed all over his face, sheer unsteadiness that comes in the morning and always fades away with time. Blinking his eyes open, lashes catching rough against the pillow case, Chris squints until he can focus, and then he sees Zachary’s profile, laying against the pillows next to him.

“Morning,” Zach says, voice low with sleep as he brings one hand out from underneath the covers, and reaches up into the space between them, pulling Chris across the mattress by the back of his head as he moves in for a kiss himself, mouth as warm and compliant as Chris (finally) remembered.

Licking his lips, Chris presses back and settles into the warm dip he’d created for himself in the mattress, and leaves both hands tucked up underneath the blankets. He echoes, voice quiet, “Morning.”

”Someone named Kristen phoned, and left a message an hour ago,” Zach says, rubbing at one eye with the pad of his thumb. “I listened to it, and still have no idea who she is. All she told me was to call her back.”

Raising the eyebrow not smooshed against the pillow, Chris rolls further onto his side, leaning so far he buries the lower half of his jaw in Zachary’s pillow.

“Google search her,” He tells the feathers packed inside. “Or rummage through your desk drawers – did you know that you write names and dates on the back of your photographs?”

Zachary half smiles and shrugs one shoulder under the blankets, shifting until they’re eye-to-eye, level on either side of the pillow.

”No,” He admits quietly, mouth still turned up at the edges. “What else do you know about me that I don’t?”

Grinning, Chris tries to play nonchalance as he closes his eyes again, and pretends as though he’s going to go back to asleep. He might. Because the real answer is Not Enough. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever have enough time to know everything about Zachary that he wants to.

You know, even in a perfect world.

.

Strangely enough, it’s somebody knocking on the front door that wakes Chris up again an hour later. It takes him a hot minute to pick his face up off of the pillowcase, wipe the drool from his chin, and realize he must have fallen back asleep, before the knocking turns into pounding, and then Noah starts barking in the kitchen.

”What the…” He trails off, flipping the blankets back off of his legs.

Coasting a gaze back over his shoulder, he realizes Zachary is still half asleep as he inhales short and sharp before rolling over, groaning low as he rubs a hand across his face.

Chris pulls a t-shirt on with one hand, and wipes the sleep out of his eyes with the other as he starts out of the bedroom, stumbling in the still dim hallway as the pounding turns into rhythmic slapping, or alternatively, punching.

He hears the bed creak, and then the sound of Zachary stubbing his toe and swearing in the other room just as he gets to the door, pausing to untwist the elastic of his underwear before flipping the bolt lock and then the chain.

Before he can make a grab for the handle, the door flies wide open and almost takes Chris’ hand with it.

“Morning.” There’s a, well. For all intents and purposes, _innocent enough_ looking woman standing on the stoop, her hair pulled up into a high pony tail, and a mammoth sized green mixing bowl balanced against one hip.

Chris blinks, swallowing compulsively. This is someone he recognizes. “Hi.”

”Know what today is?” She’s still using that deceptively chipper voice that has each and every one of Chris’ hackles going up automatically.

He self consciously straightens his shirt a little, and then replies, slowly, “I think it’s… Friday?”

“Oh my God,” She sighs, rolling her eyes as she pushes against Chris’ stomach with her palm, and unceremoniously takes a step inside the front foyer, pausing to stoop down and pet Noah affectionately before she makes it too far.

He has taken to wagging his tail like a maniac instead of barking, also like a maniac.

“Hey there buddy, how are you?” She’s asking, grinning down at the dog as Chris stands awkwardly to the side, the front door still wide open.

Just as she straightens up and he decides to close the door, Zachary makes an appearance in the hallway arch, looking far more like a normal person than Chris currently does, in a pair of yoga pants and a long sleeved shirt.

“Morning sunshine,” She grins, reaffixing the mixing bowl to rest against the curve of her belly, both wrists bent awkwardly in front of it. Chris, still a little sleep-dazed, flips the lock on the door again, and then turns back to watch as Zachary raises his eyebrows, a genuine enough looking smile already on his face.

He’s a little more natural at this whole fake pretending to not be the man with half a brain thing, as the genuine-enough smile becomes hard to argue with and he holds one arm out, giving her a half hug as he says, voice casual, “Morning, sorry about the mess.”

”Don’t worry about it,” She shoves him lightly, and he smiles, surprised. Chris doesn’t even think she’s noticed the boxes of relationship contraband laying around quite yet, or even that neither of them have tidied up or done the dishes since three days ago.

Now that he thinks about it, Chris is pretty sure that the bottle of Jack Daniels is still sitting by itself on the kitchen island.

“I just came to pick up the bruschetta you were making,” She tells Zach, already heading between them in a start for the kitchen. Casually, she turns her head and calls over one shoulder, “Didn’t you say you had a wine you wanted to try, too?”

The look Zachary shoots him is uncertainty at its absolute finest. Chris widens both eyes and raises his eyebrows as if to say ‘you are on your _own_ ,’ which leaves Zach to follow after her quietly; Chris can hear her sneakers squeaking against the tiles in the kitchen.

As he watches Zachary turn the corner into the kitchen and disappear from sight, a thread of cold realization runs through him, quelling the slight high of amusement he had going on. 

_Fuck_ , he thinks to himself. The invitation he found on Zachary’s desk: _fuck,_ this must be _Kristen_.

”Huh,” He says out loud, and then heads for the kitchen.

Upon arrival, Chris sees that Zachary has managed to steer Kristen away from the fridge, and has detached the mixing bowl from her hip, leaving it on the counter as he distracts her with the coffee machine. The coffee machine which Chris is vaguely confident neither of them have actually mastered yet.

Or figured out how to use at all, really.

“And Dax just won’t shut up about it,” She finishes, rolling her eyes as she turns and leans against the edge of the kitchen counter with her hip, turning her attention to Zach when he doesn’t immediately reply. She watches as Zachary burns himself on the coffee pot, and then asks, voice curious, “Are you okay? You’re both… jumpy.”

Without meaning to, they both answer in perfect synchronization, “We’re fine.”

”Alright.” Kristen, however, doesn’t seem at all convinced. Chris smiles quickly, this awkward grin stilting both corners of his mouth. It makes her look even less convinced, and then confused when he drops it just as fast. She finally says, “Maybe you guys should get out of California for a while.”

Zachary hustles a cup of coffee into her hand, and smiles a little. “We’re working on it.”

”So, tonight, huh?” Chris asks her, promptly ignoring the alarmed expression that immediately shocks its way across Zachary’s face. The mere mention of the party seems to brighten Kristen up, and she smiles immediately, her attention back to Chris. “Can’t wait.”

The coffee Zachary pours for him lands on the island counter top with a glassy _smack_ , and Chris grins widely, turning the mug around until the handle faces him.

“It’s going to be _great_ ,” Kristen promises, sipping at her coffee before her eyebrows wrinkle over the rim of her mug, and she swallows, turning to face Zachary, voice suddenly dripping with uncertainty. “I’ve been planning this for weeks… you didn’t forget the bruschetta, did you?”

Zachary grins widely, jerking a hand up as he brings his own coffee to his mouth and takes a big gulp. It’s obvious right away that it’s way too hot, and burns like crazy going down, but he bites through it, cringing a little before he manages a quick shake of the head.

“No, no,” He tells her, hastily setting his cup back down on the counter as he tries to surreptitiously rub at his throat, and then chest. “It just needs some fresh basil, I haven’t had a chance to… you know what, I’ll just stop by your place this afternoon, and drop it off.”

She grins at him, _awww_ s, and just like that, the crisis is temporarily averted.

Chris hides behind his coffee mug and eyes the almost empty bottle of Jack pushed to the side of the counter. It’s still within arm’s reach.

He actively talks himself out of swigging a little drop into his drink underneath the counter top. He’s pretty sure, amnesia or not, that would be in bad taste.

.

Fifteen minutes after Kristen leaves with her mixing bowl and a second cup of coffee poured into one of their travel mugs, Zachary is on the computer Googling ‘bruschetta’, and Chris is rummaging through all of the office drawers, trying to find something that might have Kristen’s home address on it.

“And you’re sure it’s not on your phone?” Chris yells through the one wall separating them, which he can also hear Zachary talking to himself through. He doesn’t know why he’s yelling.

Zach is in the doorway suddenly, with a torn piece of paper in his hand as he eyes Chris like it was just suggested Zach go dig the bruschetta out of a dumpster. He says, “I’m well connected but I’m not a _stalker_.”

”Why would you think I have a _date book_ then?” Chris snaps incredulously, standing up from where he’s just uncovered the last four years worth of joint income tax returns, and a pile of printed emails concerning one of Zach’s old projects. “It’s not my fault I forgot we were supposed to be at some party tonight. And she seems like she’s more your friend than mine, anyways.”

Still goggling at him, Zachary bites out, “If you’re going to steal things off of my desk, at least _remember what you’re taking_ , so we don’t find them again three days too late.”

“Would you shut up, look, I found – ” Chris stands up from his crouched position Indiana Jones style, victoriously holding up a piece of rumpled paper on one hand. “Aha, look. You ordered her Christmas present online last year, and had it delivered to her house.”

Zachary doesn’t look convinced as he steps into the office, holding one hand out until Chris stops grinning and reading just long enough to hand it over.

“ _You_ ordered it,” Zach quickly corrects, pointing to where it lists that the package had been shipped to Kristen Bell, ordered by C. Pine, and charged to a credit card that has Zachary J. Quinto as the cardholder’s name. “I _knew_ she was your friend. I would never order a Christmas gift over the internet.”

Frowning, Chris snatches the piece of paper back, and re-reads it.

Zachary starts laughing before he even makes it back out into the hall, which makes Chris’ stomach jerk a little in resentment. The only appropriate retribution to that is to ball the piece of paper up before Zach can get too far and throw it at him, so he does. 

It drifts through the air and touches Zach on the shoulder before bouncing to the ground.

Unable to not laugh, Chris snorts into the palm of his hand when he hears Zach make a sound of righteous indignation, and then say, “Hey we _need_ that.”

.

Zachary commissions the first semi-expensive sounding, relatively fancy yet still familial Italian restaurant that he finds on his Urban Spoon app, and orders three servings of bruschetta while texting Kristen to let her know that they’ll just bring the food with them when they come that night.

“I’m nervous,” Chris tells the mirror as he’s buttoning up his shirt, turning the cuffs and straightening out the seams.

Sitting behind him on the bed, Zachary moves his attention from the phone still in one hand, and returns the gaze Chris is directing toward him through their reflections in the mirror, replying, his voice soft, “I know. Me too.”

.

En route to pick up the bruschetta, Kristen texts Zach, _don’t forget the wine!_

It takes them an extra fifteen minutes to figure out how to get back to the house, as they hadn’t planned a GPS route that involved three illegal U-turns, and ten more after that to fumble around the wine cooler, arguing over which sounds more expensive.

Forty minutes later Zach is hurrying back out of the restaurant, food in one hand and his cellphone in the other as he tries to speed walk across the parking lot without messing up his hair or stepping in something questionable.

“We’re going to be late,” Is the first thing that Chris says, as Zachary slides back into the car, white box balanced in one hand as he straightens out the front of his suit with the other. Chris makes a face and distractedly accepts the box from Zach, asking, “Are you sure this looks good? I feel… itchy.”

Slamming his door, and thanking the parking deities that the attendant didn’t come around and catch him in a handicap only spot, Zachary turns the ignition over and replies, clearly distracted. “You look fine – put it on the plate, come on, she only lives five minutes away.”

“Yeah yeah, I’m on it,” Chris mumbles, popping the catering box open as Zachary reverses out of the spot with sudden ferocity, and then peels through the small, packed parking lot, and back out into traffic.

.

By the time they’re halfway to Kristen’s, Chris has artfully arranged the bruschetta on one of the appetizer plates they dug out of a low kitchen cupboard, carefully hidden the empty catering box in the drawer underneath his seat, and double-double checked that they are still in possession of the wine Kristen is so excited for.

“All clear,” Chris finally sighs, as he feels his heartbeat begin to even out for the first time since that morning, when the whole dinner party ordeal began.

There’s silence for a second, before Zach asks, “Do you have _tomato sauce_ on your shirt?”

”Augh,” Chris groans, resolutely digging the back of his skull into the chair’s headrest before lurching forward at a red light, one hand extended in effort to crack the glove box open.

Zach seems like the kind of guy to carry around some kind of emergency suit repair kit: a wet nap, a spare button down – at this point, one of those bleach pens would suffice.

Actually, at this point, and with the googly eye Zachary is currently oogling at him, a dry napkin and some of the white wine they’ve got in the backseat might do the job just as well.

.

They turn up on Kristen’s stoop ten minutes later, Chris holding the plate stacked with three orders of bruschetta, Zachary with the wine, still smoking the last dreg of his cigarette.

“I thought you quit,” Is the first thing that Kristen says, as she accepts the plate, and the corresponding awkward half hug that Chris bestows upon her. Mainly, she pats his back and watches Zachary over the shoulder she’s got her chin tucked against.

Zach shrugs, and flicks the cigarette into the driveway.

“Patch didn’t work, hands were fidgety,” He says, bustling Chris past her, remembering to stop, stoop down, and kiss her on the cheek. Zach smiles as convincingly as he can as she stares at him oddly, taking a step back with the plate in both hands. “You know.”

The expression on her face says that no, she doesn’t know.

Zach keeps the little convincing smile on his face as he and Chris start toward the kitchen to get the wine uncorked, leaving Kristen standing in their wake, dressed to the nines in her most expensive black cocktail dress. 

Both of her hands are still braced around the bruschetta plate tightly, fingers locked and awkward as she stares after them, trying to work her eyebrows back down into a normal position, and straighten out the confused wrinkle in her forehead.

.

“I _knew_ I was hiding them for a reason,” Zachary whispers as they step into the margarine yellow kitchen, his mouth bumping up against the shell of Chris’ ear as they both come to a stop, bodies on pause just outside the fridge of the crowd.

.

Someone throws _Rebel Rebel_ on iTunes shuffle, and, while Zachary is pouring he and Chris’ second drinks of the night, he overhears two guys in the smokers circle just outside the kitchen start singing along, their voices drifting in through the crack in the window.

“This is really bizarre,” He tells Chris, voice a low murmur as he hands him his wine glass. They both glance up as some girl passes them both by, doing a drive-by smile and wave without stopping to (re?)introduce herself.

Chris nods, agreeing heartily, and takes a gulp of his wine. He eyes Zach from the corner of his eyes.

“I’m going to have to fuck you to Diamond Dogs tonight,” Zachary sighs into the curve of his wine glass after a second, lips quickly picking up into a smile when another perfectly coifed, grinning woman breaks from the crowd with ‘Zaaaaach’ and ‘Chriiiiis’ on her mouth.

As Zach begins to steer the tipsy, well dressed woman away, Chris breathes in through his nose sharply, takes another gulp of wine, and consciously makes an effort to not get a boner in the middle of Kristen’s black tie dinner party.

It’s a lot easier pretending he knows everybody.

.

Almost everyone gravitates into the living room once all of the appetizers have been served, and four bottles of wine are already sitting empty beside the sink.

Kristen and Dax have alternatively been arguing or making out with each other all night, Zach has snuck out to the balcony twice, was caught by Kristen once, and Chris has made a career from tasting all of the food, and drinking most of the wine they brought.

It’s a success, really, as far as successes go when trying to charade your way through a night full of people that have known you longer than you’ve known yourself.

Chris isn’t surprised when the hairline cracks buckle, and all of a sudden he’s trying to keep one broken man together with his own shaky hands.

.

He finds Zachary outside on the patio after midnight, with another one of his Marlboros hanging out from the corner of his mouth, glass of wine almost empty where his fingers are slung around the neck, holding it over the edge of the railing.

“Hey.” Chris makes sure that the door swings shut behind him before he starts across the creaky wooden slats, his dress shoes shining back at him from the light that bleeds out from inside.

Zachary looks up sharply, like he’s been caught, but relaxes as he realizes who it is.

“I can’t do this,” He says, bringing one hand up to hold onto his cigarette as he takes a deep drag, smoke right down to his stomach as his lungs expand. Holding the smoke inside, he bows his head forward, bending to look down into the yard. “I thought I could, but I can’t.”

Cautiously, skin beginning to prickle, Chris watches as smoke curls up in a huge, looming cloud above Zach’s low hung head.

“You’re fine,” He hushes, taking a step closer. Quietly, he comes to stand next to Zach at the edge of the balcony, leaning both elbows against the railing, feeling his suit pull over the thickest part of his shoulders as he braces himself. He glances over, taking in the shadowed expression passing over Zachary’s profile. “ _We’re_ fine.”

Smiling jerkily, Zachary shakes his head and then laughs hollowly, fingers trembling as he moves to ash his smoke over the edge of the balcony. “We are not fine.”

”We’re as close to fine as possible despite the current situation,” Chris replies, voice wobbling despite his efforts as he stoops in a little closer, one weary gaze cast over his shoulder to check the door. To make sure that nobody is eavesdropping. “Zach, nobody _knows_.”

Zachary is quiet for a second, eyes trailing, watching the ground dark and low beneath them, before he turns to Chris and says, his eyebrows raising, willing Chris to understand. 

If there’s anybody in the world that will get this, it’s him.

“But I’m not fine,” He hushes. “I’m not me. I know I’m not. You know it, too, and so does everybody else in there.”

With one hand he jerks a finger towards the kitchen window hung in the middle of the balcony, yellow, warm light spilling out into the cool late fall night.

“We’ll figure it out,” Chris repeats himself, taking another step closer, until he can rest his cheek flat against Zach’s shoulder without any hesitation, until he can cast his half-hung wine sleepy eyes out over the backyard beside them.

Zachary sighs, “We should tell them.”

”Tell them what?” Chris asks, pulling back, leaving one hand on Zachary’s hip as he watches Zach’s hand, flicking the filter of his cigarette, the ember almost burnt right down to the insides of his fingers. He tosses it over the edge just as Chris is thinking that, this little ember disappearing into nothing. “Zach. I don’t even know what to tell myself.”

Then there’s just silence, this stoic, loaded _quiet_ that has Chris watching Zach’s face for something, anything that might let him on to what is about to happen. A minute passes, then two, before Zachary breathes in deeply, and exhales, bringing one arm up around Chris’ shoulders.

“It’ll be our little secret,” Chris breaks and continues, his voice so soft that Zach can barely hear it for himself, as Chris is tugged in against Zach’s chest, both hands going to his waist. “Just something we have to deal with on our own.”

Zach suddenly realizes that Chris is right.

Whatever he was, whatever they were, before all of this – whether it was a golden Hollywood couple, the token gay set invited to the dinner party circuit, _anything_ that was supposedly ZachandChris – it isn’t who they are anymore. 

The people they were a month ago are gone because they’re forgotten, not because they were worked hard upon to be replaced.

Turning his head slightly, Zachary looks over his shoulder and into the kitchen window, where the party still inches along, empty plates beginning to stack up along the drunk wine bottles, crumpled napkins and bitten utensils.

He catches Kristen and Dax arguing in the kitchen without meaning to. Zach can’t hear them, but it’s obvious what’s going on as they both gesture wildly, Kristen’s lips moving with a sudden ferocity that could only be enticed from male stupidity.

Zach keeps his gaze trained on the window, cheek still rested against the rise of Chris’ shoulder as Dax storms off and Kristen is left to click-clack over to the sink on her tediously high heels, snatching one of the wine glasses from the dish rack to wash by hand.

She’s going at it with this certain rage, spinning it back and forth under the stream of water, scrubbing the inside with a dish rag, gritting her teeth as she scratches her nails over the lipstick stain around the rim. Then she looks up, and glances out the window on a whim, maybe.

It’s when they both lock eyes that Zach really gets it, that she _doesn’t_ know. She hasn’t realized, not yet anyways, he can tell by the way recognition flickers across her face and then she smiles, a little sulkily, maybe, and raises one of her hands from where it was submerged in the sink, waving slowly.

Zachary raises the hand that had been against Chris’ shoulder blade and waves back, watching her face, waiting with a certain patience that could only ever come from being the person stuck in that position before, until her smile drops into a pout, and then she mimes slitting her own throat before smiling widely, warmly, again.

Wiggling his fingers in a little wave, Zach offers up just the smallest splinter of a smile before she looks at him once last time and then leans down to turn the tap off, wiping her hands on the front of her dress before she totters back into the party with a certain practiced grace.

Turning his face into Chris’ shoulder to resolutely press his mouth against the dip he finds there, Zach breathes out against the expensive fabric and then raises his head, pulling back to look Chris in the face.

“Let’s get out of here,” He sighs, the corner of his mouth almost twitching up into a smile.

.

The next morning comes later than it usually does, a wakeup heavy with the lingering remnants of too much wine, and a couple hours too much sleep.

Chris rolls over and takes most of the blankets with him without meaning to, as he blinks his eyes into clarity and watches Zachary work on getting out of the bed, his legs first, before a total lift off from the mattress as he scrubs both hands over his face and then up through his matted hair.

Closing his eyes, Chris tucks his head a little deeper into the pillow, and exhales slow, as quiet as he can make himself be. He breathes out until his lungs feel like they’re going to collapse on themselves, until he’s hot with the intent to inhale again.

Today, he’s going to get out of bed, and learn about himself all over again.

And it’s going to be fine.


End file.
